Re: Fleurons

["John R. Culleton" <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Wednesday 01 June 2005 11:53 pm, Hans Hagen wrote:
> Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:
> > Why? Anybody is free to make tfm files, as afm files are
> > always available for _that_ set of urw fonts.
>
> the problem is that there is a bunch of context users out there
> who think (are being told, whatever) that they should use the
> provided ones instead of generating them by texfont or afm2tfm
> (so they want to use the presumably present ones and not
> generate them by texfont, which is ok for me; but unfortunately
> they are not always there; and then they try the ps ones, which
> are only there for ec and not for texnansi and then ... and
> then ...)
>
> well, i give up on fonts ... maybe some day i just put metric
> files in the context zip (ec texnansi qx), why should i care
> about those few extra bytes
>

I use only the 8r encoding because I write/typeset in (American)
English and I need special characters like the copyright symbol.
the registered symbol, the trademark (tm) symbol and so on. Some
of these are not available in other encodings, or at least I
cannot find them. I understand that Europeans prefer other
encodings with good reason but 8r needs to remain in the scheme
of things IMO. 

I not only use plain tex, pdftex, Context etc. in my own work I
advertise these Open Source solutions as effective alternatives
to e.g., InDesign. To sell the system to new users requires a
K.I.S.S. approach. 

Is there a problem in Context with making the URW fonts the
default and then just aliasing the Adobe names to the URW versions?
The more we can hide these details the better. 

Font handling is the great Achilles heel of all flavors of TeX,
as we all know. Since Context is (relatively) new if we can
jigger things around so that the K.I.S.S. principle is adhered
to then selling the concept to new users will be easier. Too
many people in the printing world have horrid memories of LaTeX
from their college days or other earlier experience.

(K.I.S.S. = "Keep it simple silly.) 

> thanks for your patience

And thanks for Context!

-- 

John Culleton